Back and forth

By Bernard Karganilla

January 11, 2018

WITH the trash returned to their origins, we expect the devotion displayed in Quiapo this week to be converted into people power for the termination of tyranny, popular struggle to defeat jihadism and people’s power toward nationalist development.

Yes, such devoutness is demanded in a mega-city choking with traffic jams, bureaucrats, street crimes, squatters, alien pests, dirty air and carpetbaggers. Simpler, cleaner life? Nonagenarians and octogenarians probably feel comfortable living in the past; their president marked out their Philippines in this wise: “We are earnestly concerned with social justice...Social justice involves many and varied questions, such as taxation, wages, land ownership, insurance against accidents and old age, etc.” [http://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1938/01/24/manuel-l-quezon-fourth-stat...

Their other president, the bigger one (their Philippines a colony of USA), pictured the Union whose state had “problems arise out of the concentration of economic control to the detriment of the body politic – control of other people’s money, other people’s labor, other people’s lives.” [Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 3, 1938. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15517]

Our elders’ world of 1938 was not suffocating from the infantile postings in social media and moronic posturings on TV but it was a dangerous place. “At the same time, by the pursuit of their predatory aims in China, the Japanese imperialists have accentuated the inter-imperialist antagonisms which are forcing mankind to the brink of a new world war.” [Frank Glass, The War In The Far East and The Revolutionary Perspective, January 1938]

“Such an aggressive power as Japan refuses, to date, to take any part in limiting her naval armaments...Fascist Italy also, for all manner of trivial reasons, has refused to sign any agreement with other countries on the limitation of naval armaments.” [V. M. Molotov, Speech at the Session of the Supreme Council of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, January 1938]

“Germany, Italy and Japan finance, at a daily increasing rate, the formation of fascist groups...they collect the refuse which the movements have dropped since 1910, thieves without luck, fanatic Catholics encouraged by priests. Some reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie follow in their footsteps, since they see in the action of Hitler and Mussolini the remote but only possibility of growth and consolidation which Yankee imperialism never will permit them...fascism can come to power as it did in Brazil.” [The Class Struggle in Mexico (as of January 1938), The New International, March 1938, pp. 85-87]

Our great-grandparents who were already college students in 1938 would find themselves three years later battling the Fascists in Bataan. Thus, the millennials of 2018 should count themselves lucky that they can afford to obsess about their FB-Instagram pages with their smart phones, ignoring the ISIS menace in Syria and Mindanao.

Our senior citizens would not have imagined in 1938 that they would live in a world of microwave ovens, cars that talk, blade-less fans, video conferences and email. For the juveniles of 2018, a snapchat of their future:

(1) “As the ethnic Russian population in the Far East plummets and eastern Russian cities stand largely empty, it would be natural for Chinese interest and appetites to turn northward, potentially increasing friction in the area. Large numbers of Chinese have already been filtering into the region on a variety of pretexts, visas, and business interests.” [https://www.dni.gov/index.php/the-next-five-years/east-and-southeast-asia]

(2) “I am confident time travel into the future is possible, but we would need to develop some very advanced technology to do it. We could travel 10,000 years into the future and age only 1 year during that journey. However, such a trip would consume an extraordinary amount of energy.” [https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/time-travel.html]

(3) Seven decades from now – the real attack of the clones: “The column of soldiers emerged from the chilly night. Each face similarly hardened and bare from the long day of training and the many preceding. Each face exactly the same. Identical. These American infantrymen were designed in a lab, their biology optimized for perception and endurance, and deployed to the field in 2088.” [http://www.warningsbook.net]

The Filipinos in their 90s today were aborning in 1918 just as World War One was concluding. Their parents may have heard of the “land ironclads” in action in Europe. “I described one in a story in The Strand Magazine in 1903, and my story could stand in parallel columns beside the first account of these monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas or Mr. Philip Gibbs...Tanks were first mooted at the front about a year and a half ago; Mr. Winston Churchill was then asking questions about their practicability; he filled many simple souls with terror; they thought him a most dangerous lunatic. The actual making of the Tanks arose as an irregular side development of the armoured-car branch of the Royal Naval Air Service work.” [H.G. Wells, War and the Future, 1917]

How about the Filipinos in their 20s today? What kind of combat would they see hence? “Like the rest of us, Sgt. Jaynie Vasquez is wearing a combat uniform, body armor, and the gray titanium bones of her exoskeleton. Her finely shaped eyebrows are set in a skeptical arch as she eyes me from beneath the rim of her brown LCS skullcap.”

“In the LCS ranks, we’ve nicknamed the exoskeletons our ‘dead sisters’ because all the parts except the floating footplates look a lot like human bones. Shocked struts with knee articulation run up the outside of the legs to the hips. Across the back, the rig takes an hourglass shape to minimize profile, ending in a shoulder-spanning arch that easily supports both the weight of a field pack and the leverage that can be generated by the slender arm struts.

“Packets of microprocessors detect a soldier’s movements, translating them to the rig in customized motion algorithms. A soldier in an exoskeleton can get shot dead and never fall down. I saw that in Bolivia. And if there’s enough power left in the dead sister, it can walk the body back to a safe zone for recovery.” [LINKED COMBAT SQUAD EPISODE 1: DARK PATROL. Excerpt from THE RED: FIRST LIGHT by Linda Nagata]

Related News

About Malaya

Malaya Business Insight's weekday sections treat readers to timely articles on shipping, banking, information and technology, automotive and motoring, real estate and property development, travel and tourism and people and sectoral events. Special issues and supplements are designed to enrich current information and data files of readers with pre-selected topics of national and local significance.